IBSA - South Africa

Emerging economies China, South Africa and Brazil have indicated their openness to legally-binding carbon emission reduction targets from 2020 during the United Nations climate change summit in Durban, South Africa.

The convergence of leading countries from the global South - China, India, Brazil and South Africa, among others - to assist the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere constitutes a new "dynamic" in the emerging global economic partnerships, says the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo have signed an agreement to build a major hydroelectric power project, which is said to bring electricity to more than half of the continent’s 900 million people. But economic analysts warn that foreign investors will prevent the grid from benefiting the general public.

When the G20 leaders meet for their fifth summit in Cannes, France, on Thursday, they will be confronted with several worsening global economic and trade issues. Among them is how to strengthen the international trading system and how to overcome the developmental deficit that continues to create an uneven playing field for poor countries.

Headlines this week have been saturated with protests against unaffordable food, unfair taxes and unsustainable austerity measures, with one distinct difference setting these stories apart from countless others in recent history.

Since the election of Camille Gutt of Belgium as the first managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) back in 1946, the Europeans have continued to claim that job as their political and intellectual birthright.

The glass isn’t exactly half-full, but it certainly is not entirely empty either. Within the broad failure of the weeklong Fourth U.N. Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC-IV) in Istanbul that concluded Friday, many delegates are taking heart in a strengthening South-South front that has emerged.

"In South-South cooperation we are all partners," Josephine Ojiambo, ambassador of Kenya to the U.N. and president of the U.N. General Assembly High-Level Committee on South-South Cooperation, told IPS. "SSC specifically shies away from the donor-client relationship."

The first weeks of April have witnessed a maelstrom of multilateralism – from the chambers of the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) here to the round tables of the BRICS summit in the resort island of the Hainan province in China – leaving in its wake a tome of unanswered questions regarding the contours and configurations of the new world order.